Free Financial Planning Tools to Make Budgeting Easier

No matter your financial security, everyone could benefit from a personal finance command center.

More and more people are using online financial planning tools to help with budget creation, spend tracking from single and multi-income families and provide accountability to those trying to be more resourceful with their money.

What are some of the other benefits?

It’s Free

There are many sites available at no charge. However, that doesn’t mean you won’t have to click the ‘x’ on a few special offers from their contributors. Here are a few of our favorite free financial planning tools and websites:

• Mint.com – Mint is the online jack-of-all-trades money resource. You can create budgets, track income and spending and organize your spending habits. Better yet, they also have a mobile platform for on-the-go queries.
• FlexScore – This free site calculates your personal finance score based on how you manage your money on a day-to-day basis. After calculating your score it shows you how to improve it through options such as lowering your mortgage rate or updating your life insurance.
• GuideFinancial – While GuideFinancial won’t provide you with investment advice, it is a useful way to track your spending and gather advice on money matters, such as its step-by-step guide to saving while you refinance a mortgage, or its guide to choosing the best savings account.

All of Your Accounts in One Place

Most banks offer online services to check balances, pay bills and transfer funds but it is rare to have all accounts at one institution. Financial planning tools make it easy to combine all of this information in one convenient place.

Mobile Access

Many tools, such as Mint, have complimentary apps for iPhone and Android phones and tablets that puts all of your financial information in the palm of your hand.

Create and Maintain a Budget

Not only can you discover where you are spending the most money, you can also set personal limits for different categories. For example, say that a spending tracker determines your coffee habit is costing more than $100 a month. You can set a $50 coffee limit for the next month, and the site will send you a text message as you near that benchmark.

Community

Even though these tools are a useful way to help you create and maintain financial goals, they can’t always answer all your questions. To help with this, Mint has created a personal finance blog to keep customers up-to-date on their own products and trends in the finance world.